Word: lear
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Lear has the sort of temperament that might be described by Archie Bunker as "hebe Hollywood egghead"-or, if Archie knew the word, compulsive. The only eye in the hurricane of activity that he whips up around him each day is the moment when he retires to the men's room for a thorough perusal of the New York Times. One of his two outside interests is writing letters to Presidents and other political leaders on such topics as Viet Nam, the ICBM debate and school desegregation. His voluminous correspondence with four Administrations is filed in a cabinet...
...former Actress Peggy Diem, by whom he has a son and a daughter-shuttle between a Spanish-style home in Beverly Hills and a rented beach house at Malibu, where Yorkin occasionally dons an Archie Bunker sweatshirt and barbecues hot dogs for neighbors like the Henry Mancinis. Although, like Lear, he describes himself as a putative liberal, he sometimes turns up for dinner with Henry Kissinger when the presidential adviser makes one of his forays into Hollywood salons...
...problem," says Yorkin. "We know that whatever either of us succeeds in doing is good for both, because it all goes in the same pot." The pot is growing bigger; what to do next is becoming a multimillion-dollar question. Indeed, what else is left for Yorkin and Lear now that they have given TV a new system of dating-B.B. and A.B. (Before Bunker and After Bunker)? How much longer can they compete with themselves for the top audience ratings...
Quite a while, no doubt. Already in the works is a one-hour special on Duke Ellington. Lear is preparing yet another sitcom series for a possible January debut on CBS, this one about a black family named Jones. "Sanford isn't trying to reflect real ghetto life," Lear maintains. "Compared with ghetto dwellers, those two men live very, very well. What I would like to do is a real black-ghetto family show...
Above all, though, Yorkin and Lear yearn to make it in the movies. The failure that each nurses most lovingly is a film. With Yorkin it is Start the Revolution Without Me, a 1970 farce about the French Revolution that he produced and directed. With Lear it is Cold Turkey, a 1971 satire in which he directed his own script about an Iowa town that collectively kicks the smoking habit. Erratic but lively and intriguing, both works were just slightly out of sync with the shifting rhythms of public taste that Yorkin and Lear's TV shows have always...